1. Technical Field
Aspects of the present invention relate to hardware and software products. More particularly, aspects of the present invention relate to providing users with an improved process for entering information in Asian languages.
2. Description of Related Art
Computing systems exist in a number of languages. These languages include character-based representations and symbol-based representations of words. While the Western 104 key keyboard is widely used around the world, users of symbol-based languages have needed a way to input symbolic while using the limited input that keyboards offer. One way to input symbolic languages is to use an input method editor (IME by the Microsoft Corporation) specific for a language.
Asian textual input is one of the most challenging computing problems existing today. It has been a bottle-neck of Asian language computing. The Asian language character set is continuously growing with every revision to the Unicode standard. For instance, the CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters defined in Unicode 2.0 is 20,902 characters. Unicode 3.0 includes 27,484 characters. Extension B further adds 40,771 more characters.
IMEs provide a conversion engine to convert English letters into Asian characters. Generally, the encoding of Asian characters is based on the phonetics of the Asian character. This may include a combination of letters or letters and numbers. At times, one may need to convert English punctuation into the Asian language's punctuation. Further, English text may be combined with Asian text (and/or mixed with symbols, phonetic letters/characters and Asian ideograph (Chinese characters)), thereby requiring the ability to switch between encoding methods quickly and easily.
There are a number of issues associated with previous approaches:                a. It may be difficult to discover and access necessary functions in IME including basic functions;        b. It may be difficult to remember necessary IME functions on a consistent use basis;        c. The input process is error-prone due to the above issues as well as conflicts between keys that have different purposes (for instance, SHIFT keys that have different functions based on a state of an application);        d. The input process suffers from reduced productivity due to one or more of the following:                    i. Less efficient use or no use of key IME functions;            ii. Consequential error rate described in c) above;            iii. Touch-typing is virtually eliminated as users are forced to searching a keyboard and picking or pressing the key.                        
An improved system is needed that allows users to quickly and easily enter text in Asian languages.